Tried to build a teams chatbot for our org. There are five different official starter templates, none of which work, but all use different outdated versions of the Microsoft packages required. They point to documentation that is missing (like 404 missing), outdated, containing code samples that don’t match the SDKs; the build fails after startup, or only works together with a VS Code extension. Tasks require an obscene amount of boilerplate code that is never really explained; configuration options are not properly documented, sometimes the types are broken.

Everything you could imagine being wrong with an enterprise JavaScript package and much more is in that hellish rabbit hole.

Used to work for a company that owned a Teams extension. Teams updates will just randomly break your extension behavior without any warning or heads up. The migration to their "new teams" app was brutal.

Their SDK is built into 2 view render portions. 1 for in-message rendering using their own markup syntax for structuring views, and another that's just a web browser. So if you want to share components between 1 for messages and another for your pane, you can't.

Ingesting events is not very well defined. Everything gets sent to 2 endpoints you define and it's up to you to determine how to handle it.

Just some of the issues I came across in my short time at the company.

None of the onboarding material actually works. I guess because it’s all based on Azure/Entra which changes so frequently.

So there’s videos, articles, VSC extensions, all to help you navigate this Byzantine structure. But they’re all just wrong.

Look I’m not a pro dev so YMMV. Kick the tyres for a few days and see if you can get it to do anything. I never could, and the experience was just no fun at all.

At least with web dev, that I’m also no good at, it can be fun. Teams was like pulling my own nails out.